Angelina Pwerle, “Bush Plum,” 2010

With 61 works by nine artists, Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia is both comprehensive and illuminating. On view at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology until March 31, it features works commissioned by Miami art collector Dennis Scholl and has toured five American cities. This is its only showing in Canada.

The exhibition includes traditional works such as memorial poles painted in earth pigments. Elsewhere, two wooden dolls are suspended in a web of fibre from the palm-like pandanus tree and augmented by huge, oversized canvases painted in a less traditional medium – acrylics.

Nonggirrnga Marawili, “Yurr’yun,” 2015

All works use Indigenous iconography and all are infused with meanings deeper than what appears on the surface.

Angelina Pwerle’s hypnotic Bush Plum, for instance, makes one think of floating through space. In fact, the dots represent not stars but the white flowers of the bush plum, painstakingly applied to the canvas with a stick.

“The women sit on the floor and they paint looking down into the earth, into the world, into the painting,” says Carol Meyer, the curator who organized this iteration of the show. The result is a colour field that has nothing to do with the Milky Way.

“Here are the symbols that tell you what happened, but what or why is not so accessible,” says Meyer. “When you think you get it, in actuality, you’re only getting a tiny little bit of it.”

She notes that we often see only what the community’s elders allow the women to portray. Historically, men were responsible for ceremonial painting and women helped by filling in sections. But starting in the late 1980s, when many Aboriginal people returned to their homelands from government resettlement centres, women began to paint for themselves in a looser, freer style.

Carlene West, “Tjitjiti,” 2015

Witness the paintings of Carlene West. In Tjitjiti, she depicts her salt lake home territory in sweeping, painterly strokes. Red dots represent her walkabouts. The black ground represents lands beyond the salt lake. It has a strong design and might be dubbed abstract art in the West.

Perhaps Nyapanyapa Yunupingu has deviated from tradition the most.

“She starts with a circle and then another circle,” says Meyer. “She’s very insistent that you can’t attach meaning to it. She says it just is. I just do this.” As a result, Aboriginal men who see her work are confused, Scholl says, unsure what to make of her.

Such stylistic and cultural evolutions are just one aspect of the exhibition. Scholl hopes the project will bolster his argument that Australian Aboriginal art, in all its forms, is as good as Western contemporary art and deserves a place in North American galleries. That, he says, is what motivated him to commission the works in the first place. ■

Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia is on view at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver from Nov. 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019.

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Vancouver-based journalist John Thomson holds a BFA in painting from the University of Manitoba School of Art. Trained at the CBC after graduation, he comes from a news and current affairs background and today writes arts-related stories.